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and for the first time since learning of Krissa's marriage, he began working on a lyric. It was about loss, but not private loss, not loss of a romantic love. This was public loss, the lost innocence of a country at war few believed in, the loss of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Kennedy—of a king young men could believe in. It was about hungering to live with a tradition one could value, about longing to pay heed to customs that one could respect. It was called "My Grandfather's Chocolates." In the last stanza the grandson's regret and bitterness blazed into anger, fury at the generation who squandered their traditions. And as Quinn worked and reworked those lines, he knew that he was coming as close as he could to writing about Krissa.
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